Wednesday, May 2, 2012

Interracial romance in comic books

It's not quite what it looks like, though—the woman gets her dying wish, a kiss from Blackhawk.

Though they never kiss, there's a strong hint of interracial romance in a 1952 comic book of King Solomon's Mines. On the cover, a white man and a black man appear to be fighting for the love of a black woman.

Sure, she's paler than the black guy, but she's still black in a time when interracial marriage was illegal in many states. As Gallup notes, only 4% of Americans approved of marriage between blacks and whites then, while 77% approved by 2007:

DC Comics missed a chance for a semi-interracial kiss in 1970 when Lois Lane became black for a day:

To give them a tiny bit of credit, they did have her ask if he could love her if she was black: